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Zonie63 -> RE: Threat to the Mall of the Americas (2/24/2015 8:45:10 AM)
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ORIGINAL: Sanity
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ORIGINAL: Zonie63
I never really could understand how or why terrorists choose their targets, at least when looking at some of the more notable terrorist attacks during my lifetime. I don't know what any terrorist group could expect to gain by an attack on the Mall of America (or any similar target), other than incurring another wave of intense wrath from the American people. It doesn't cause people to cower in fear or fold up; it just makes people even madder.
Islamists dont think anything like you think. They are raised to believe that they are invincible, because they have the power of Allah on their side.
They believe that these are just the opening salvos of the newest, latest battle in a war they have been fighting since the time of Mohammad in which a successful tactic all along has been terrorizing those victims who they come to displace and destroy in their holy quest to seize the planet as their god commands. They are not playing patty-cake. Terror is a tool to them, as terrorized people flee or are otherwise too scared to fight, and so are much easier to carve up, enslave or convert. They dont care if they die or how much "madder" you get, as long as most of the target population eventually lives in sheer terror of them.
Perhaps, although history has shown that it takes a LOT of terror to cow the majority of the population, something at the level of the Allied terror bombings in WW2 or the kind of widespread political terror which tends to occur after a seizure of power. Terror has been shown to be effective when it's calculated, organized, and oriented towards a specific objective. But when it's random, willy-nilly, and without any rhyme or reason, it seems as if they don't have any coherent goals. These seem more like acts of desperation in a losing cause.
Their actions are more like a dwarf kicking a giant in the shins and then running away to hide. Sure, the giant might feel pain from being kicked in the shin, but the bottom line is we're still the giant and they're still the dwarf.
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And they also understand that they have already taken a very large portion of the planet with their terror tactics.
They also understand how much they've lost, not to mention how far behind they've been technologically and militarily. The Ottoman Empire was the last major Muslim power that gave the West any real grief - and that power was already on the wane even before WW1. Since then, most of the Muslim world has been either subjugated by European nations or otherwise under European or American hegemony, from Morocco to Indonesia. Despite the vast wealth a few have gained from oil, most of the Muslim world is still filled with squalor and sub-standard living conditions. None of these nations have the wherewithal or the infrastructure to produce the kind of military muscle needed to even defend their own territories, let alone launch a massive invasion of the entire world.
Ultimately, their terror tactics haven't really worked. For one thing, they prey on each other quite a bit, too, and that's why there's so much internecine violence among people of the same religion fighting over territory which "they have already taken." That's part of the reason how the West has held the upper hand all this time.
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